“The hell you say…y’all are weaklings…I’M the strongest woman I know because I just had a root canal…or changed a dirty diaper…or worked on Valentine’s Day in a flower shop…or chaperoned a class of first-graders on a field trip!!”

Get the ridiculousness of where this phrase could go???

So what’s up here??

This is what’s up with all this “strongest woman” stuff…you can’t read hardly one Facebook post without reading this phrase in the comments, or maybe in the post itself…”she’s the strongest woman I know”.

Oh, really?? REALLY????

I personally think I’m a strong enough person and have had some trying times that have strengthened my character, but I could throw a rock and hit any number of people that I know and say they are all strong. Is there a PARTICULAR “strongest woman I know”???

I definitively say NO, and for these reasons:

You devalue all others and their strengths in the face of their trials by elevating one person to the status of “strongest woman I know”.

And why is there never a reference to “the strongest MAN I know”??? Shouldn’t men be given the respect that they, too, might have awfully hard times that they persevere through??

And not to mention this phrase is so overworked, so trite, so sappy, that it just shuts me down ASAP and puts me in a very Mrs. Hate mood over the inanity of many people’s communication skills and thought processes.

Did people go around saying “she’s the strongest woman I know” a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago??

I doubt it. The most one might have said would be “now that’s a strong woman” when she carried on after her husband was, say, electrocuted while working on the farm and she was left with five or six children and how was she going to feed and clothe them (this would be at a time when most women did not work “outside the home” and before the days of massive government assistance).

But flowering it up and gussying it up and hyperbole-ing it up with “the phrase I’m sick of hearing” would just not happen, in my opinion.

You took what life threw at you…it might not be fun, it might not seem fair, it might not be pretty, but you didn’t expect to be lauded and praised and made much of.

You got through your trials, or maybe your trials were never exactly over, but continued on, and you gritted your teeth and endured. You didn’t expect praise; all you might want is a little empathy now and then, or a home-cooked meal or an offer to do a chore, but that would be about it.

To repeat a statement from Part 1 in this rant series (see last Friday’s post): Our brains are in danger of turning into mush. Looks like it to me, anyway, from reading Facebook and blogs.